Tag: Illustration

Finished the basic geometry on Baby Catchers. The colours are all over the place and are very, very temp. I just needed them as reference to keep all the shapes straight in my head. I can’t work in a line-only mode over a long period. Here, take a look at the uncoloured lines:

I do start my work on each character with unfilled shapes. I’m generally good enough at working with vectors to be able to, like here, do all the shapes for a single character and then go about filling them from a library of colours I’ve already used elesewhere in the image.

Once I have basic geometry, like here, I can go back in, decide on which character needs the most detailed shading (Savant here needs the most, since he overlaps many characters and actually touches things like Scullers face, which is lost because of the similar colours at this stage), and which ones need to be left simple (other than stripes and a few embellishments to his armour, Roseweaver will be kept simple since he’s in the background).

Overall, I need to hammer down the colour pallette now. I’m not very happy with the colours on the coats, skin tone’s okay, Roseweaver’s colours are hideous. Then comes the detailing, and finally lighting and atmosphere. In many ways, working in vector is a lot like working in a 3D program: you start off with basic geometry and then your move on to texturing and lighting.

On the novel front, I’ve decided to do it the old old fashioned way and actually write it with a pen and paper. My handwriting sucks. I pretty-much stopped once I left school (no real reason, just moved to a computer for most work and never really needed it), and I’m really out of shape. Never written fiction like this, so I’m very unsure about the pace. Typing on the computer is sort of more my speed — I can type about as fast as I think (i.e. not very fast) — but writing it may a little slow even for me.  Oh well, have to try, and it might as well be now.

Also been thinking of going back and actually reading what I wrote 5 years ago. Maybe make a few changes in light of newer plot ideas, but nothing major. Yeah, going cold into the second part of a novel is probably not the best idea. I don’t want to have it all finished up and then realise I killed* some character 5 years ago who inexplicably forms the lynchpin of my cool new plot**.

* – I don’t think I’ve killed anyone….
** – There is no cool new plot.

So, more colouring will take place, and maybe even some writing. Anyone want to read short cast and crew bios and stuff?

PS. Large version of the above image here:

Started colouring the Tale of a Thousand Savants “Baby Catchers” image. I’m doing this using the kickass (open source) vector graphics program called inkscape, mostly because I like the clean look of vector art and the logical, editable-at-any-time collage-like nature of the workflow. Also, I haven’t loaded in the drivers for my graphics tablet since I switched to XP on the work comp, so doing something like this in the GIMP would be be harder, especially given my horrible bitmap painting skills.

I started out by doing basic colours on the baby. The way I handle these is usually I put down basic outlines, boolean new shapes for specific things like hands and feet that I know will require their own shading later, and then flat-colour them with mid-tones. The colours are usually borrowed directly from my last image (things like skin tones and such) and are temporary — it’s just something to look at while you work. Once I’ve done the whole image in flats to my satisfaction, and I’m happy that the colour range is not all over the place, I go back in and draw and boolean shadow and highlight shapes for characters and objects. After that it’s a matter of adding in things like lighting gradients and object shadows, patterns and texture, adjusting colours etc.

This time I’ve decided to put in simple gradients from the get-go, and the results are not bad. Depending on how the image looks once everything is coloured like this, I may decide not to make the shadows and highlights as solid shapes (as I usually do) and only go with gradients. The results will look much softer. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

On the novel front, I chalked out a basic outline of what needs to happen over the next few bits. Right now I get the feeling that it’s a little too scattered, that — in a bullet-point form anyway — there seems to be a lot of running from here to there and sidequests. Of course, all of this may just go out the window once I’m actually writing, and that, believe it or not, is a good thing, i.e. it’s good when your novel tells you how it wants to be written.

Also, I can fix any number of things in second draft, if I ever get there (let’s just worry about finishing the first, okay? I’m already 5 years late!). Meanwhile, colouring continues. I’m wondering if I should go from front to back (Savant being at the front, and therefore first) or rear to front (Kaja being the least defined and in the BG, hence requiring less work). Probably the latter. Like novel-writing, every illustration needs a certain amount of time where you aren’t enjoying it and you keep plugging away at it until you start to hit your stride. Until this happens your work can be sloppy and unfocussed. I’d much rather be bored with a background character than to have to come back later and clean up shoddy work on my main character.

Writing, illustration: it’s all the same, really.

Five years ago this November, I started writing my first novel, after having written fiction actively for around a year and a half. It was called The Tale of a Thousand Savants, written for the yearly nanowrimo mass, um, thing, and like the illustration above, was never finished. I enjoyed starting it, and I enjoyed plugging away at it for the first ten days of the month, but soon I was going nowhere and personal issues cropped up that made writing a frivolous fantasy romp the last thing I wanted to do. By the end of the month I was still somewhere around 9K words, and with the deadline of December 1 rapidly approaching I was all set to give up on it.

And then a funny thing happened. I started to write. A lot. In the last four days of the month the word count went up to 34K, still far short of the 50K finish line, but nonetheless far more than I had ever written on anything, an perhaps equaling my entire output of short fiction until then. It was utterly crap, and not spell-checked (Dan and Spyder can attest to this), but somewhere along the way I had found my characters and the thing just started to write itself.

Unfortunately, those four days gave way to what has now become five years of slow, then non-existent writing output. This past year even my overall creative output has dropped to near zero (I must shamefully admit here that Dan and Spyder can attest to this fact too). I miss being myself. I miss writing, because, frankly, for those two or so years — and those four days in particular — I felt, I knew, that this was what I was meant to do. This was right.

In the past few years I’ve tried — usually around every November during nanowrimo — to kickstart my stalled writing again, but while the projects have shown promise, the writing itself felt laboured and dead.

Now I am, quite literally, at the end of my creative rope, and, as they say about low points, there’s nowhere else to go but up. So, this November I’m going to return to the project that helped me find myself five years ago. It’s a continuation of a novel, so I can’t in good conscience say it’s going to be a part of the official nanowrimo event, but I am going to give it my best shot and write at least 50,000 words in the month.

I doubt that will finish the novel. By my estimate, what I have so far is only around 1/3rd of the plot, but I’ll get there eventually. Some time before that, this picture will be ‘finished’ (i.e. coloured and polished). For now, here’s a larger version of the sketch.

Excerpts and character bios will be going up whenever I write them, and will be posted here. Let’s see how this turns out. Bring your Mars bars.